NewTech Friday: Indeez – protecting the needs of independent workers

Indeez aims to provide everyday protection needs of independent workers while empowering them and helping them achieve their full potential. Protection of income is a key unmet need and something that threatens the sustainability and growth of their lifestyle. Today, despite independent workers growing in society, they do not have access to income protection solutions. We estimate that they will make up 50% of the global workforce over the next 10 years. 

Covid-19 has only worsened their economic situation. With Indeez, we hope to remedy this situation and are partnering with digital platforms to build income protection for their communities of independent workers and small business owners. Addressing the needs and aspirations of independent work to make the future of work sustainable is not just a global problem but a generational one!

The founding team is ideally placed to work on this ambition, with its strong market credentials having previously built some of the largest gig protection programs (at previous employers) for the likes of Uber and BlaBlaCar. We are also guided in our mission by the advice of our institutional and angel investors that bring deep experience in this space.

Income protection is a fundamental need for independent workers, for sustainability of their lifestyle, and this is a key product offering of Indeez. To address the Covid-19 crisis, in January we launched a first version of #CoviSure, an instance of our income protection product, that was particularly aimed at independent workers in the “Gig Economy”, such as VTC drivers, couriers, e-merchants, catering staff and maintenance workers. Since then, we have extended #CoviSure to now also cover independent workers and entrepreneurs who are primarily engaged in desk-based activities. Consultants, freelancers, graphic designers and developers can also now benefit from this protection that provides them a lump sum of up to GBP/EUR 6000 benefit to remediate loss of income in case of Covid infection.

#CoviSure is a growing initiative today with support from 15 EU platforms and we welcome others to come and join. The product has been launched across partner platforms in France and the UK market to make it accessible to buy for about 500K independent workers. The platforms are creating awareness with their respective communities. Separately we have launched a direct B2C channel to allow access to buy #CoviSure for other workers (not part of the partner platform).

Indeez is working with European digital platforms to expand the income protection offering to their communities and mitigate a key gap that threatens the sustainability of independent work. This will be our focus over the next 12-19 months. We are working with digital communities such as gig, freelancers, small and micro business owners to build income protection programs for everyday life events such as maternity/paternity, accident, sickness, pandemic etc. with a great end-user experience. The Indeez tech platform is cutting edge in the market - since it allows the products to be on-demand, customized to community and market needs and with a great end-user experience. We aim to make the income protection offering a market standard for gig workers across platforms, so it provides benefit portability for workers.